My younger brother Ron and I were very big for our age. When people told Pop, "You have really good looking boys," Pop would smile and agree: "Yep, they're strong as an ox and nearly as smart."

Thursday, March 06, 2008

Happy Days are Here Again!

I admit I was scared. The Obama bus was blazing along, fueled by hot air and wishful thinking, while Hillary looked and sounded old and desperate. Obama seemed out of bounds for any questions tougher than, “With the world in such a sorry state, isn’t it time for change?”

Mind you, “I don’t cry for you, Hillary.” I was glad to see her take her lumps. She has a lot of experience, all right. Experience screwing things up.

My wife, Alice, is an entrepreneur par excellence. While Hillary attached herself to Bill’s star, Alice started a “man’s” business, and totally succeeded where her competitors found it easy to fail.

Alice still hasn’t forgiven Hillary for attempting what turned into Hillary’s, and Bill’s, greatest debacle: “Hillarycare.” At the time, Alice’s business, Vulcan Incorporated, had just weathered the mild recession that brought Bill Clinton into power.

Since Bill owed Hillary big time for “standing by her man” through Jennifer Flowers and other “Bimbo Eruptions,” he let her run with changing healthcare as a reward. Hillary, in her unimaginative bulldog way, proceeded to dig in to every element of healthcare, and created a highly detailed and complicated abomination that only a Democrat could love.

When it was brought to her attention that the costs to small businesses of providing healthcare to their employees would bankrupt many of them, Hillary famously said: “I can’t be responsible for undercapitalized small businesses.”

When she heard Hillary’s comment, Alice screamed, “That Bitch!”

Alice is too much of a lady to say what other words she was thinking at the time, but they were inspired by the many years of hard work, sacrifice, worry, and torment that Alice had invested in establishing and growing Vulcan.

And then, there was this politician’s wife who only knew business as an employee, not an employer, cavalierly threatening to destroy Alice’s hard-earned prosperity and security.

And for what? For a theory that was a relic of wartime controls, when businesses competed for labor with benefits, because it was illegal to compete with wages.

Now we’re stuck with a system where employees are afraid to change jobs because they might lose healthcare coverage, and costs are out of control because healthcare consumers don’t pay its costs.

Hillary, if you were as smart as your supporters think you are, you would have started a movement to unshackle healthcare from employment through privatization, but that would have betrayed your allegiance to finding big government solutions to everything.